The journalist and podcaster Molly Lambert rounded the corner of a hulking, desolate building at the end of a largely abandoned office park in California’s San Fernando Valley, looked up and pointed to a vast, smudgy stripe of black dirt on a side wall.
“If you look, you can kind of see the letters still,” she said, shielding her eyes from the August sun on a recent afternoon. Imprinted in the grime, just barely legible, were the words “Vivid Entertainment.”
“The sign would glow blue at night and you could see it from the freeway,” she said. “I used to think of it as the gateway to the Valley.”
From the early 2000s until it shuttered in 2019, the Vivid Entertainment office had been the closest thing to an official headquarters for pornography. The country’s largest adult film studio strove for Hollywood production values, helped make stars of actresses like Jenna Jameson, Tera Patrick and Sunny Leone and claimed to earn more than $1 billion in revenue in 2001, at a time when consumers readily paid for the pleasure of owning sexually explicit home videos.
In the Valley, where Lambert grew up, it represented the apotheosis of the local industry. Since the 1970s, the Northwest region of Los Angeles had been the seat of an alternative entertainment business, populated by audacious entrepreneurs, filmmakers and performers who operated in suburban homes with blacked-out windows a short drive from the lots of Universal, Warner Bros. and Disney.
Digital piracy and the rise of amateur and user-generated content online ultimately spelled doom. But, as Lambert argues in her new podcast, “JennaWorld: Jenna Jameson, Vivid Video & the Valley,” premiering in October from iHeartRadio, the spectrum of empowerment and exploitation once navigated by porn performers is baked into the offerings of popular internet and social media platforms today.
“It used to be that only certain people had to be aware of how to perform for a camera, or how to conduct themselves onscreen,” she said. “Now every person you know is performing for the camera all the time.”
Lambert, 41, was raised around the entertainment business — her mother was a film accountant and her father was a radio producer — and took an interest in portrayals of women in the media at a young age.
“In L.A., there were always sexualized pictures of women on billboards selling something,” she said. “I used to wonder, What is it like for her? Does she get paid? Who gets paid?”
As an adolescent, the trial of Heidi Fleiss — who was convicted in 1994-95 on state and federal charges related to running an exclusive Hollywood prostitution ring — inspired similar questions about sex and equity.
“I was like, ‘Why does she get in trouble and the men who paid for her services don’t?’” Lambert said.
Her previous podcast, “HeidiWorld: The Heidi Fleiss Story and the Secret History of L.A.,” released in 2022, traced Fleiss’s path from upper middle-class, suburban babysitter to felon and tabloid fixation. It was named among the best podcasts of the year by Vulture and Vogue.
“JennaWorld” is the product of Lambert’s longtime fascination with Jameson — a fellow former Valley resident — whose frequent appearances on cable television in the 1990s and 2000s helped normalize sex work.
“I’m interested in the agency of women who get treated as objects,” Lambert said. “Both Jenna and Heidi became these kinds of screens for everyone to project their feelings about pornography and prostitution.”
Following a format similar to the one employed for “HeidiWorld,” the podcast uses Jameson’s interviews, TV appearances and memoir as source material, with an actress, Lauren Servideo, performing her dialogue. Lambert said she hadn’t tried to interview Jameson for the series, but would be open to speaking with her once it is finished.
“I didn’t want her to say, ‘This is what you should say about me,’” Lambert said. “The show is about her, but it’s also about the media world she existed in.”
Jack O’Brien, senior vice president of development at iHeartPodcasts, which also distributed “HeidiWorld,” said the podcast supported the company’s strategy of working with talented storytellers who have a strong, original perspective.
“I think one of the strengths of podcasts is delivering alternative takes on things that you don’t get in other media,” O’Brien said. “Molly has a way of weaving deep research on these subjects with a stream of consciousness style that makes you want to listen.”
Over 13 episodes to be released weekly, “JennaWorld” tracks Jameson’s journey from daughter of a Las Vegas showgirl to promising young stripper to face of the global porn industry. As an actress on contract with Wicked Pictures (Vivid’s chief rival in the Valley) and later as the head of her own company, she blazed a trail from the adult video store to the mainstream, establishing herself as a bold, blond and self-aware ambassador for the sex trade.
Jameson was a frequent guest on the E! network shows “Howard Stern” and “Wild On!,” had cameos in the Eminem music video “Without Me” and an episode of “Family Guy,” and even appeared (under a pseudonym) as a playable character in the video game “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4.” Her company, ClubJenna, earned $30 million in revenue in 2005, according to Forbes, with Jameson’s films regularly selling 50,000 copies at $50 each. The memoir, “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star,” published in 2004, spent six weeks on The New York Times’s best-seller list.
“People were not OK with porn stars and then, with Jenna, there was a moment when she was everywhere,” said Vanessa Grigoriadis, a journalist and co-founder of Campside Media, who profiled Jameson for Rolling Stone in 2004. “I think of her as the bridge to someone like Kim Kardashian — the forces of porn and pop culture were starting to merge.”
Lambert recalls going to Barnes & Noble to buy “How to Make Love like a Porn Star” the year it was released. At the time, she was majoring in art semiotics at Brown and felt uncertain about her own prospects as a person aspiring to work in media.
“Everything was moving online and it didn’t pay anything like what people got paid writing for magazines,” she said. “Working on the internet was somehow being set up as a lower tier of work.”
After college, Lambert wrote for Pitchfork, The New York Times Magazine and became a staff writer for the sports and culture website Grantland, where she worked on her first podcast, a chat show called “Girls in Hoodies.” On Twitter, she cultivated a sardonic voice — a heightened version of her natural personality — and accumulated in the neighborhood of 60,000 followers to whom she could promote her work.
In 2015, Grantland was shuttered, following a shift in priorities for its parent company, ESPN. In 2022, Elon Musk acquired Twitter, changed its name to “X” and overhauled the algorithm powering users’ feeds, giving more preferential treatment to sensational and video-centric content. Lambert finally deleted her account this year.
“For my whole experience in media, everything has been on the verge of collapse,” she said. “You’re just leaping from one ice floe to the next.”
By 2008, Jameson was retired from porn and had sold her media empire to Playboy — right before the proliferation of free adult content online began devastating the industry. In recent years, her public appearances have mostly been on TikTok and Instagram, where she frequently posts selfie videos, memes and photos of her pets. Through a publicist, Jameson declined to comment for this article.
“She was early on turning yourself into a brand for other people’s consumption,” Lambert said of Jameson’s legacy. “It was a lot like being a podcaster.”
Reggie Ugwu is a Times culture reporter.
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